All righty. Hello everybody. This is Albert with Parting Pro and in this presentation I'm going to talk about why the pre-need and or at need arrangement forms on your website are hurting your business.
Before I get started, I just want to show you some proof about how important your website, and really the online experience, that you give to your families are. Because a lot of people don't really take notice of this. But the families definitely noticed this. These are all five star reviews written by families of funeral homes using Parting Pro. The families all come back and write a review mentioning the online experience that they had. So this is very important to your families, which means it should be also very important to you as well.
If you haven't seen my other video, I go over a framework for you to use to analyze and improve your current website so that generates you more business. You can check that one out first, so this will be somewhat of a part two of that video. But in case you missed it i'll cover a really important basic concept which i'm sure you already know.
in order for your business to be successful it needs to be hyper focused on the customer right? Yeah i think everyone can see this as pretty obvious. And i think most funeral homes do a really great job at giving their families the best experience they possibly can. However, when the interaction or communication with the family starts to move online, you start seeing this experience deteriorate.
So examples of this could be perhaps the way most funeral homes might show options or merchandise to families via emailing a brochure or the long process the family needs to go through to get signed documents over.
A lot of times this has been the norm for so long funeral homes don't even realize they're not giving their families the best experience possible. This is also very true with the pre-need or adding form, and why is this happening? Once again it's because a lot of the technology that's been around the industry for a while does not focus on the user experience.
It doesn't really hyper focus on your families as you would if you were meeting the family in person. You'll also notice that the pre-need and/or at need forms are not in the least focused around the family, which should be your main focus. And I think I can easily make the argument like these documents or these forms are designed to be very funeral home centric, rather than family centric.
This is all information that you need, right? it's not information that they want to give you right now. And I understand that you will need this information at some point when they want to use your services, but think about the mindset the family might be in when they get to your website and if this is the best time for you to collect the information or format.
So to illustrate this concept a little bit more broadly, in terms of what the goal of these forms and/or even your website is, let's talk a little bit about my previous role.
So before I started Parting Pro I worked at a tech company up in San Francisco and my main focus there was really to get people that came to a website to fill out the information. So in a nutshell, how the business works is the company would buy traffic to their to a website, to a landing page and there would be some sort of offer. And then people who are interested in that offer would fill out their information.
Imagine this funnel as the website. This is the money we're spending to get people to the website, filling out their information and then ideally we would sell these leads for more money than we paid for them. And this business only works if enough people that see the offer actually fill their information out.
So what determined how much money we were able to make was really how well we could get someone to fill their information in. And that was literally my entire job.
So the information that you asked for, the order that you asked for it in, the way that you ask for it, how it looks, all have very big effects on whether or not someone that lands here will actually take the time to put information in. So we had entire roles dedicated to this position.
So when you think about your funeral home website it's essentially a very similar format. So you have your website, this is the funnel. You buy traffic, you get people to come to your website, you spend money on that. You market you market your business and then you…. your goal is for them to reach out to you or contact you in some way usually by a phone call or fill out their information. And then all the costs you incur plus the marketing... you hope that the revenue you generate is higher than the cost. And then that in a nutshell is how you make money.
So why are these at need or preneed forms you have on your website hurting you? Well I think very just speaking very bluntly, they don't convert. They do not convert. Everyone I talk to, everyone I look at, they know they're kind of all more or less the same. They all come with the same.
To me it doesn't look like anyone has spent very much time or thought energy behind the design of these forms.
Anecdotally I've spoken to probably, i don't know, like 2,000 funeral home owners over the past couple years and very few people have told me that they get more than zero or one person filling this out every month.
Also from just a completely objective point of view this is a lot of information to ask someone for. Especially if they don't even know if they're gonna use your services yet. On top of that they're asking for very personal information, like some of them ask for social security number. And then the biggest reason I think is there's no obvious benefit to them filling it out. What do they get out of this fulfilling information right now?
It's not very clear
So put yourself in the shoes of your families. Like would you fill this out if you were them? if you were inquiring about services for a different business and they asked you for all this information up front, would you put that in right off the bat?
Typically the only time someone fills this out is when they've already talked to the funeral director and the funeral director made them feel comfortable and then they guide them to the form they fill it in but at that point, you've already won the business.
So at a very macro level isn't it strange that every single funeral home in America has this form on their website? Or some format of it right? Often taking really prime real estate when this form performs so terribly.
Think about how many people came to your website in the last five years. Think about how many people came to your website in the last ever since you've been in business, ever since you had a website, looking for information, getting to this forum, not wanting to fill it in and leaving.
That's all potential business walking on your door because you're not optimizing their online experience. Whoops back here go back here. all right so skipping through back here.
So really I think this is just one small example of how a lack of focus on the user experience and technology can really hurt your business and just because everyone else has one on their website doesn't necessarily make it good, right?
So that's just something for you to think about. If you haven't seen my other video, where I talk about what the goals of your website should be. I have another video on how to improve your website, really without even changing providers that you might find helpful.
If you're looking to optimize all aspects of your customer experience online just book a call with me or my team. Happy to walk you through it. Happy to show you how we're able to help funeral homes give their families a better online and offline experience. I hope this thought process helps. See you guys in the next video.
